FRED Version 14.110.2 Released!

FRED Version 14.110.2 Released!

Photon Engineering, LLC is pleased to announce the release of FRED 14.110.2, which is now available for download from our website. This is a major version release which offers new features designed to make optical system engineering in FRED even more usable, diverse, and efficient.

New Features Summary

Distributed Computing (Optimum Version Only)

A new distributed computing capability has been added to FRED that allows calculations to be distributed to an arbitrary number of remote nodes on your local network, reducing the calculation time proportionally with the number of nodes being used (subject to node compute performance). Network communication between computers is enabled through the use of the new FRED Remote Service (optional component of the FRED installation) or through MPI. Only a single FRED Optimum license is required to take advantage of this new capability.

Lens Import

The lens import code has been completely rewritten to support new surface types, tilt/decenter options in CodeV and Zemax, and contains several new options for source creation including iterated (real) chief ray sources or full pupil sources. In general, the lens importer is much more robust compared to previous versions and will correctly reconstruct the optical layout for all combinations of refractive and reflective systems.

Network License Access

A restriction in the license usage for network keys (and Remote Desktop) has been removed so that a single license is checked out from the key based on unique username/machine combinations. As many instances of FRED can be started on this single license without using up additional licenses. Previously, only one instance of FRED could be launched per available license on the dongle when accessing the key in a network mode.

Random Number Generators

The random number generators in FRED have been substantially upgraded to have extremely long periods in order to support raytraces with very large numbers of rays.

Power Law GRIN Material

A new power law GRIN material definition with a floating point exponent has been added along with a set of scripting commands to support material access and modification.

Miscellaneous Upgrades and Bug Fixes

In addition to the major new improvements described above, this release contains many smaller feature additions and bug fixes. Some smaller feature improvements are related to tabulated BSDF interpolation, script validation of coherent rays, the ability to query a ray’s relation to a birefringent material, the ability to use ARN’s during optimization, upgrades to raytrace path reporting, and many others. Please refer to the developer Release Notes found on the Help menu inside FRED.